Comment by regularfry
2 years ago
It could also be that there is a potential effect that this study would have been underpowered to detect, and by chance no trend was visible in this population. That's not inconsistent, or even particularly unlikely, if I'm understanding it right.
(A) To suggest that the lack of effect in men is a statistical anomaly, and that there IS an effect we're not seeing.
(B) To suggest that the effect in women is a statistical anomaly, and that there's nothing there but a fluke.
These things, from the data, are approximately equally likely. Because there was zero effect in men -- in fact, men who took the vaccine were apparently more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, though this trend was extremely slight.
> These things, from the data, are approximately equally likely.
They aren't. The paper states that 95% confidence interval for men includes a maximum protective effect of up to -1.9 while the 95% confidence for women include a minimum effect of -1.3.
Thus it is far more likely that there is a protective effect for man than no protective effect for women.
Are you ignoring the fact that it might have a negative effect, rather than a protective effect?
The range for men is -1.9 to +2.1 -- which averages out to +0.2 -- which indeed makes it seem as though the vaccine's trend is to make one slightly more susceptible to Alzheimer's, rather than less susceptible, which is itself borne out in the figure's trend line. (Fig 4.)
For women it's -5.3 to -1.3.
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this isn't necessarily true. if the study had 1000 women and 100 men, it would be a lot more likely that the result in men was wrong. similarly, if the effect was 20x weaker in men than women, but still existed you would be much more likely to see no effect in men even though effects existed for both.
Total study size was 282,541 people, 128,322 men and 154,218 women.
From supplementary material 1, page 27: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v...
Not necessarily true in a theoretical sense, sure.
But there's absolutely no indication that they enrolled 10x (or even 2x) more women than men. Nor is there any indication of any effect in men, 20x weaker or otherwise. (If we're charitable, it's pretty much a flat zero.)